Chris Skurka

The Necessary Evolution of Mass Communication Research in a Fragmenting Media Landscape: With the ongoing evolution of media channels, debates over the concept of mass communication have been reignited. When we live in a society of filter bubbles and AI-generated content, the very notion of a large uniform audience has been undermined. Indeed, the process of mass communication looks different today than in the early days of the field, which naturally affects how to define and measure media effects. In this forum, leading communication scholars provide arguments as to whether we should keep using the term “mass communication,” adapt its definition, or develop entirely new concepts that better reflect our fragmenting media environment.

Does “mass communication” still exist — and if so, what should it mean today?

In this Forum for @jmcquarterly.bsky.social, we reflect on that question: "The Necessary Evolution of Mass Communication Research in a Fragmenting Media Landscape."

Open-access: doi.org/10.1177/1077...

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

There is No Scientific Justification to Revoke the Endangerment Finding The U.S. EPA's decision to repeal the Endangerment Finding will limit the government's ability to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

As I say here, there is no scientific justification to revoke the engagement finding. In fact, over the last 15+ yrs, the evidence of how climate change affects our health has only grown. Higher risk of allergies, dementia, fertility, heart disease, and death: that’s what’s on the line. @nature.org

this is a level of complicity that had not occurred to me

photo of Pam Bondi testifying in the foreground as a group of 7 women and 1 men raise their hands

Likely-historic photo by NBC News of all the Epstein victims asked to raise their hands if they've not yet been asked to meet with the DOJ as Bondi testifies in foreground

Holy moly this chart: Cumulative US measles cases

I am a climate scientist and this is correct.

As the planet warms, storms like the one today are getting stronger… and as the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the mid latitudes, it increases the risk of the “freezer door” swinging open.

Technical explanation here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Mortality rates:

Mifepristone: 0.65/100,000
Penicillin 2/100K
Viagra 4/100K

Pregnancy in the US: 22/100,000 (some states see rates >60/100K)

More people have died in ICE detention centers already in 2026 than will die from mifepristone all year. These politicians are extremely dangerous to women.

As the world burns, let's get one thing straight. A video podcast is just a TV show.

Such an unreal, death cult headline

Classy!

After a White Town Rejected a Data Center, Developers Targeted a Black Area Four million Americans live within 1 mile of a data center. The communities closest to them are “overwhelmingly” non-white.

After a white county in South Carolina rejected a data center, developers have sets their sights on a Black community for a proposed data center complex the size of 1,200 football fields

Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts.

Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.

Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its…

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses.

China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns From 2027, cars sold in China must have manual door releases after electronic handles failing during crashes. Tesla and other brands will need design changes.

Super low hanging safety fruit. US regulators have had a decade plus to get manufacturers to make safe door handles and still they haven’t.
www.autoblog.com/news/china-i...

Birth Lottery If you were reborn today, where would you land? And how would that change your life?

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth.

www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective?

In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported.

Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate.

Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains.

Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

CONGRATS to PhD candidate Wilhelmina Antwi, who defended her dissertation proposal today. With co-advisors Lee Ahern and Juliet Pinto, and committee members @chrisskurka.bsky.social, @matthewpmcallister.bsky.social, and Sinfree Makoni (PSU's Director of African Studies).

The RFK, jr effect.

An open dataset of EurekAlert! press releases for science communication research - Scientific Data Scientific Data - An open dataset of EurekAlert! press releases for science communication research

📰 Quantitative research on science communication requires suitable data. When it comes to academic press releases, that data is scarce. In a new paper, we introduce a dataset of more than 500,000 press releases published on @eurekalert.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Screenshot of a December 2025 Pew Research Center article noting that for the first time in more than 50 years, the immigrant population in the United States is now in decline. This trend has been driven by deportations, voluntary departures and fewer new arrivals.

The annual @pewresearch.org list of striking research findings from the past year is out.

#1 on the list: After more than 50 years of rapid growth, the immigrant population in the United States is now in decline.

www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

CONGRATULATIONS to PhD candidate Peixin Hua, who passed her comprehensive exams today! ABD! With advisor @chrisskurka.bsky.social and committee members Heather Shoenberger, @olivermb.bsky.social, and Shannon Cruz (CAS).

Trumpist rule consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be a president and executive branch whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside its opponents and victims whom the law binds but does not protect.

You've got one week left to submit your application for our Health/Sci Comm Assistant Professor position here in
@bellisariograded.bsky.social, so please share with anyone who might be interested!

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me? Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.

We've finally got some hard numbers on AI's energy demand from a major tech company: Google says a median prompt to Gemini uses 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. 🧵 @technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

US to rewrite its past national climate reports US President Donald Trump's administration is revising past editions of the nation's premier climate report -- its latest move to undermine the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.

The Trump administration has announced that the US will rewrite past climate reports, in a clear attempt to erase scientific history and undermine the consensus on human-caused climate change.